The Cakekitchen: Calm Before The Storm

The Cakekitchen

Calm Before The Storm

Rough Peel Records (RPR)

Here’s the latest set of songs from The Cakekitchen (aka Graeme Jefferies). Since the late 1980s Jefferies has been adding to a body of work – under the Cakekitchen name – that includes earnest lo-fi singer/songwriter fare, bedsit punk and beguiling field recordings. Sometimes you’ll hear this all in the same song – certainly you’ll hear these sorts of ideas across any one album and Calm Before The Storm features recordings that have been worked on across the last four years, the first Cakekitchen album since the Australian-centric Kangaroos In My Top Paddock.

The opening For So Long slowly unfolds over nearly 10 minutes, a gentle intensity to this track as the simple guitar and piano lines mingle – like a bedsit-charm take on Wilco’s One Sunday Morning but with the sort of percussion you last heard on The Velvet Underground’s Murder Mystery. Jefferies’ voice – a disquieting murmur at times, breaking off to accent itself with baritone asides, bass hiccups that punctuate his flow – is something all his own. And wonderful. But then – you’d expect that. For no one else is writing songs like this – they deserve the sort of idiosyncratic treatment he affords them.

The closing title track is a gorgeous, windswept instrumental – and in between we have political songs (Back of A Bus), punk throwaway ditties (Work Today) and strange tales (Boganfoot Bill).